From:http://brucelevine.net/8-ways-young-americans%E2%80%99-resistance-to-domination-has-been-subdued/
_8 Ways young Americans' resistance to domination has been subdued_
By Bruce Levine <http://brucelevine.net/author/bruce/> on July 28, 2011
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it
is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal
institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit
of resistance to domination.
Young Americans---even more so than older Americans---appear to have
acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them
and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll
asked Americans "Do you think the Social Security system will be able to
pay you a benefit when you retire?" Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76
percent of them said "No." Yet despite their lack of confidence in the
availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored
up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to
having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security,
even though they don't believe it will be around to benefit them.
How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?
**
*1. Student-Loan Debt*: Large debt---and the fear it creates---is a
pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York
when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at
many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get
a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan
debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public
universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free
or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The
millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their
disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who
risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the
millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all
had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt. Today in
the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year
colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public
university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to
$25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to
$100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one's life when it
should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have
family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of
bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an
ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing
effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that
students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.
**
*2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. *In 1955, Erich
Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist
psychoanalyst, wrote, "Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and
psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man."
Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian
America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly
authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic
bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and
teenagers such as the increasingly popular "oppositional defiant
disorder" (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include "often actively
defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," "often argues
with adults," and "often deliberately does things to annoy other
people." Many of America's greatest activists including Saul Alinsky
(1909--1972), the legendary organizer and author of /Reveille for
Radicals /and/Rules for Radicals/, would today certainly be diagnosed
with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood,
Alinsky said, "I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a
sign saying 'Keep off the grass.' Then I would stomp all over it."
Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal)
are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States
($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to the
/Journal of the American Medical Association /in 2010, is that many
children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such
as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of
Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).
*3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy:* Upon
accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31,
1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: "The truth
is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people
work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the
abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual
contributions." A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as
a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this
problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed. The nature of most
classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be
passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the
rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things
they don't care about, and that they are impotent to affect their
situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are
essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is
instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in /The Night Is Dark and I Am Far
from Home/ focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions.
Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of "inert concern" in
which "caring"---in and of itself and without risking the consequences
of actual action---is considered "ethical." School teaches us that we
are "moral and mature" if we politely assert our concerns, but the
essence of school---its demand for compliance---teaches us not to act in
a friction-causing manner.
*4.* "*No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top"*: The corporatocracy
has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even
more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs,
the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as "No Child Left
Behind" and "Race to the Top." These policies are essentially
standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to
education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to
constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity,
critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting
illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian
society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by
corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students,
parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more
curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking
critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate
authorities.
**
*5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education*---*But Not Their
Schooling*---*Seriously. *In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was
found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read
every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent.
Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and
their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking
school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the
United States. Mark Twain famously said, "I never let my schooling get
in the way of my education." Toward the end of Twain's life in 1900,
only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately
85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough
for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, "And dropping out of high school
is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's
quitting on your country." However, the more schooling Americans get,
the more politically ignorant they are of America's ongoing class war,
and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the
1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a
Populist movement that organized America's largest-scale working
people's cooperative, formed a People's Party that received 8 percent of
the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a "subtreasury" plan
(that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for
farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers
across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of
sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from
America's well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college
degrees are increasingly shamed as "losers"; however, Gore Vidal and
George Carlin, two of America's most astute and articulate critics of
the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of
school in the ninth grade.
**
*6. The Normalization of Surveillance*: The /fear/ of being surveilled
makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency
(NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen's e-mail
and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become
increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become
increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because,
beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives.
Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid's latest test grades and
completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their
children's computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in
their children's cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other
parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with
young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party
when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they
going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of
authorities?
**
*7. Television*: In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing
in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the
following "three screens": a television set, a laptop/personal computer,
and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV,
video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other
technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are
concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate
media, but the mere act of watching TV---regardless of the
programming---is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons
have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a
more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be
to hire more guards). Television is a "dream come true" for an
authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people
see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and
distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who
depend on a "divide and conquer" strategy; TV isolates people so they
are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and
regardless of the programming, TV viewers' brainwaves slow down,
transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to
think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as
passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men
their only experience of potency, and this "virtual potency" is
certainly no threat to the ruling elite.
**
*8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism*: American
culture offers young Americans the "choices" of fundamentalist religion
and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow
one's focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are
fond of calling fundamentalist religion the "opiate of the masses," they
too often neglect the pacifying nature of America's other major
fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a
variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance,
creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus
more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the
precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist
consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of
manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to
lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust
one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism
also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the
solidarity necessary for democratic movements.
These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young
Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The
food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood
obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps
young anti-authoritarians "in line" (now by the fear that they may come
before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million
from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were
incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: "All our things are
right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions
alike."
Posted in Bruce Levine Blog
<http://brucelevine.net/category/bruce-levine-blog/>
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